Patricia Crone & Michael Cook

Excerpt on Assyrians, pp. 55-60

Assyrian International News Agency
Books Online
www.aina.org

Unlike Egypt, Iraq accommodated not
one but two provincial
identities, the Assyrian and the Babylonian. Both cultures had of
course suffered violent destruction on their fall a thousand years
before the Arab conquests as Nabopolassar and the Medes turned Assyria
into 'heaps and ruins' in 612 B.C. so Xerxes razed the walls of
Babylon, expropriated its citizens and turned its god into bullion
after the revolt of 482. Both identities nonetheless survived, the
first under a Christian aegis, the second under a pagan.

This unusual division of labour between
Christianity and paganism
was a result of the differing impact of foreign rule on the two
provinces. Assyria, which had neither the fabled wealth nor the
strategic importance of Babylon, had been left virtually alone by the
Achaemenids and Seleucids; condemned to oblivion by the outside world,
it could recollect its own glorious past in a certain tranquillity.
Consequently when the region came back into the focus of history under
the Parthians, it was with an Assyrian, not a Persian let alone Greek,
self-identification: the temple of Ashur was restored, the city was
rebuilt, and an Assyrian successor state returned in the shape of the
client kingdom of Adiabene. The Sasanids put an end to the autonomy of
this kingdom, but they did not replace the local rulers with a Persian
bureaucracy: though reduced to obedient servants of the Shahanshah, a
native aristocracy therefore survived. In one respect, however, their
position in the Persian state was an uncomfortable one. Already under
the Parthians the Shahanshahs tended to demand religious conformity in
return for political significance; and under the Sasanids they did so
systematically, thus imposing a Persian truth on an Assyrian identity.
As long as the level of integration remained low this disharmony could
be disguised by syncretic manoeuvres; but as the Sasanids brought the
local aristocracy into closer contact with the Persian court, the
meshes were closed. A Persian monarchy thus did for an ethnic God in
the east what an ethnic God did for Greek culture in the west, and here
as elsewhere the provincials were faced with the choice between the
rectification of genealogy and the rectification of faith, tashih al-nasab and tashih al-din.
Like the provincials of the west, the Assyrians stuck to their
genealogy, but unlike them they could not merely go heretical: even a
heretical Zoroastrian was still conceptually a Persian, and vis-a-vis
the Persians the Assyrians therefore needed a different religion
altogether. On the other hand, even an orthodox Christian was still
only a Greek by association; vis-a-vis the Greeks a heresy therefore
sufficed. Consequently, after a detour via Judaism, the Assyrians
adopted Christianity and found their heresy in Nestorianism.

Babylonia, by contrast, had never been
left alone. Apart from its
massive Jewish diaspora, it was flooded with Persian immigrants under
the Achaemenids, Greeks under the Seleucids and more Persians with the
Sasanids; the latter built their capital there and in due course added
yet another batch of foreigners in the form of Greek and Syrian
prisoners of war. As a result the Babylonian polity was dissolved. It
is true that the ghost of Babylon haunted lower Iraq for some two
centuries in the shape of the client kingdom of Mesene which, though
founded by an Iranian satrap, soon went Aramaic; and there were no
doubt other Aramean kings under the Parthians. But in the first place
the Babylonian identification of Mesene was weak, and in the second
place the Sasanid choice of lower Iraq as the centre of their empire
hardly left much room for a native aristocracy, and whereas the
Assyrians had a clear memory of their own past, the Babylonians did
not. One might indeed have expected the Babylonian identity to vanish
altogether, and if it did survive it was not because it remembered
itself in isolation, but because it transcended itself and won
universal respect: the Greeks bowed in deference to Babylonian
astrology and borrowed it without disguising its Chaldean origin, and
consequently the Chaldeans could borrow Greek philosophy without losing
their identity. The fusion of Greek and Babylonian paganism generated a
variety of astrological religions which, unlike the parent paganism,
could hold their own against the supreme truths of Zoroastrianism, and
which unlike Christianity were possessed of an ethnic label: an
Assyrian had only an identity, a Christian had only a truth, but a
Chaldean had both identity and truth. In Chaldea pagans therefore
survived.

Christianity did, of course, spread to
Babylonia; but whereas in
Assyria it was a way of sanctifying a provincial identity, in Babylonia
it was a way of desanctifying two. To the highly cosmopolitan
environment of lower Iraq, Christianity, like Manichaeism, was a
protest against ethnic religions, not a way of acquiring one:
Manichaeism transcended the Chaldean and Persian truths by combining
them as lesser insights within a larger and more grandiose scheme of
things, and Christianity did the same by rejecting both as identical.
The Christians of lower Iraq never lacked identity: they included
Persians, Greeks, Elamites, Arameans, Qatraye, Arabs and others. Like
the Assyrians, they might call themselves Suryane in contradistinction
to the pagans; but they never shared any single identity between them:
the only identity there was to inherit was Chaldean, and on conversion
the Chaldean renounced his ethnicity as Magian and his culture as
Zoroastrian. The Assyrian Christians have a genuine precedent for their
name, but Christians were only called Chaldeans by way of abuse.

There were thus two distinct versions
of Christianity within the
Nestorian church: on the one hand the local church of Assyria, a
chauvinist assertion of a provincial identity; and on the other the
metropolitan church of Persia with its centre in Babylonia, a
cosmopolitan assertion of a gentile truth. But if the Assyrian church
was in this respect comparable to that of Egypt, its chauvinism took a
rather different from. Egypt had preserved an ethnicity and a language
peculiar to itself among its peasantry, whereas its aristocracy
belonged to the larger Hellenised world; Assyria by contrast had an
aristocracy peculiar to itself, whereas it shared its ethnicity and
language with the larger Aramaic world. Hence where Coptic chauvinism
was ethnic and linguistic, that of Assyria turned on the memory of a
glorious past. In this connection two timely conversions served to dear
the Assyrian kings of their Biblical disrepute. Firstly Sardana the son
of Sennacherib, thirty-second king of Assyria after Belos and ruler of
a third of the inhabited world, submitted to the monotheistic message
of Jonah and instituted the Ninivite fast which saved Ninive from
destruction; and the fast having saved the Assyrians from the wrath of
God in the past, it was reinstituted by Sabrisho' of Karkha de-Bet
Selokh to save them from a plague a thousand years later." Secondly,
the conversion of Izates II of Adiabene to Judaism was reedited as the
conversion of Narsai of Assyria to Christianity. In other words the
Assyrians were monotheists before Christ and Christians after him, and
the past therefore led on to the present without a break. Thus the
history of Karkha de-Bet Selokh begins with the Assyrian kings and ends
with the Assyrian martyrs: Sargon founded it and the martyrs made it 'a
blessed field for Christianity'. Likewise in the seventh century before
Christ all the world stood in awe of Sardana, and in the seventh
century after Christ the saints took his place as the 'sun of Athor'
and the 'glory of Ninive'.

The church in Babylonia, by contrast,
had neither the ethnic and
linguistic pride of Egypt nor the historical pride of Assyria. As
against Egypt, they identified themselves as gentiles and used both
Persian and Syriac. As against Assyria, they renounced the Babylonian
past to the pagans: Nimrod, in Assyria an ancestral king commemorated
in the names of Christian saints, in Babylonia retained his
identification with Zoroaster and was either rejected as the originator
of Persian paganism" or conciliated as the oracular guide of the
Magians in search of Christ; in either case he remained a foreigner.
Likewise the tradition represented by the Christian Isho'dad of Merv is
as totally detached from the Babylonian past, for all its considerable
learning, as that represented by the pagan Ibn Wahshiyya is totally in
love with it, for all its considerable errors.

Both the Assyrian and the Babylonian
churches, however, differed
from that of Egypt in being aristocratically orientated; the first
because its Assyrian identity was vested in a native aristocracy, the
second because the disinvestment from a native identity permitted a
full acceptance of Persian aristocratic values. Consequently the
Nestorian church as such was constituted by its nobles: the endless
succession of peasants in the sayings of the Egyptian fathers gives way
to the endless succession of magnates in the acts of the Persian
martyrs, and whereas the Egyptian magnates could only just redeem their
wordly status by going Monophysite, the Nestorian sources virtually
brim over with aristocratic legitimism. The awe of Assyria for its
local Nimrodids or Sennacheribids is matched by the metropolitan
reverence for the royal descent of a Saba, Yuhannan or Golindukht, and
the Nestorians were thus united in their high esteem of power, wealth
and wordly renown. It is true that from time to time the intolerance of
the Shahanshahs precluded service at court;but local
magnates could and did stay in power, laymen played a prominent role in
the Nestorian church, and tolerant Shahanshahs received the willing
services of their Christian subjects: of all laymen it was Yazdin of
Kirkuk, the fiscal officer in charge of taxes, tribute and booty for
Khusraw II, who was honoured as the 'defender of the church in the
manner of Constantine and Theodosius'. Consequently the Nestorians were
similarly united in their attitude to the Persian king: all had
accepted the political supremacy of the Persian Empire, and even the
Assyrians could hardly hope for a Sennacheribid restoration; what they
resented was the ethnic intolerance of Zoroastrianism, and what they
aimed at was therefore not secession from the rule of the Shahanshah,
but his conversion. As members of an aristocratic church the Nestorians
likewise differed from the Copts in having a rich secular culture:
their high esteem for wordly power was matched by their high esteem for
human reason, a point endorsed by Nestorian theology. Their official
authority, Theodore of Mopsuestia, did of course know the traditional
doctrine of the Fall, according to which an initial state of human
immortality and bliss had been disrupted by sin and deteriorated
progressively until the dramatic return of grace with the redemptive
death of Christ. But he also taught a variant doctrine positing an
initial state of imperfection from which man had progressed under
divine guidance until immortality was regained with the exemplary
resurrection of Christ.One doctrine emphasised man's need
of grace, the other his ability to help himself: if the divine
instruction was to be of any effect man must necessarily be able to
distinguish between good and evil and to act in accordance with his
reason, and sin must therefore be an act of will and an act against
better knowledge. It was for this second view that the Nestorians
opted, and if they did not go Pelagian or reduce the redemption to a
mere symbol of future immortality, they certainly did play up reason at
the expense of grace.

The possession of a secure social and
doctrinal locus for secular
intellection did two things for Nestorian culture. In the first place,
whereas the Coptic church was boorish, the Nestorian church was
academic. Most strikingly, it acquired one of the few non-monastic
schools of theology in the Near East when the school of Edessa migrated
to Nisibis, and Nisibis in turn spawned a series of lesser schools; and
it similarly acquired a school of medicine with the settlement of
prisoners of war in Gondeshapur. In general the foundation of schools
recurs again and again in the lives of Nestorian worthies, and few
monasteries were without one.

In the second place, whereas the
Coptic church rejected Greek thought as morally pagan, the Nestorian
church legitimised it as proleptically Christian. For it was not of
course an Assyrian culture that was being taught in the Assyrian
schools: the cultural impoverishment of Assyria had been hardly less
thoroughgoing than that of Egypt, and just as the Egyptian heritage in
Coptic literature is limited to motifs of popular stories, so the
Assyrian heritage in Christian literature is limited to Ahiqar, the
vizier of the Assyrian kings. But unlike the Coptic peasants, the
Nestorian elite could replace what it had lost with the universal
truths of Greek philosophy. The philosophers were not only translated
but also exalted, and in due course the Nestorians became adept enough
at philosophy to export it back to the west.

At the same time the fate of
asceticism among the Nestorians was correspondingly different from what
it was among the Monophysites. Mesopotamian Christianity had begun as
an ascetic movement on the Syrian pattern, with the congregational
church consisting of Nazirite 'sons of the Covenant'. But just as the
Copts had found that they could rebuild Holy Egypt in the desert, so
the Assyrians found that they could recreate an image of their polity
around their aristocracy. It is not therefore surprising that, with the
adoption of Nestorianism, asceticism was virtually eradicated: the
'sons of the Covenant' disappeared in all but name, the celibacy of the
clergy was abolished, and monasticism discouraged. Equally when
asceticism finally returned to stay, it was in a new and different
shape. As in Egypt, cenobitism had been organised on a Pachomian
pattern; yet in contrast to Egypt the cenobites represented merely a
preparatory stage in the spiritual career. As in Syria, it was the
anchorites who held pride of place; yet in contrast to Syria their
raison d'etre was Evagrian. Iraq thus had no kibbutzim: the Nestorians
were not averse to inhabiting the desert, but they did so for the
solitude it afforded, not to grow roses in the sand. But equally, Iraq
had no pillar saints: the Nestorians were not averse to mortifying the
flesh, but they did so less to punish it for its sins than to spare
themselves the cumberous ministration to its needs for which they had
neither time nor thought in their pursuit of the mystic vision of God.